The last time I covered a Colleen Hoover adaptation, It Ends with Us turned into a half-billion-dollar lawsuit circus between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. The good news? I’m assuming the cast of Regretting You actually tolerates each other enough to skip the nine-figure legal bloodbath.

The bad news? This movie is every bit as laughable, cringe-inducing, and morally bankrupt as its predecessor—just with a different flavor of Hoover-brand dysfunction.

Whose bright idea was it to build an entire “romantic drama” around an affair that detonates two marriages at once? An act so grotesque that the only way it feels believable is when you remember it was written by a woman fantasizing about being the irresistible homewrecker who finally “gets hers” after two decades of quiet desperation.

In the sleepy coastal town of Pleasant Hill, North Carolina, devoted ER nurse and mom Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) has spent seventeen years building a stable life with high-school sweetheart Chris (Scott Eastwood) after a teen pregnancy derailed her dreams. Their whip-smart 16-year-old daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) is weeks from graduation, testing boundaries and rolling her eyes at Mom’s protectiveness.

Everything shatters the night Morgan’s husband and her sister Jenny are killed in a car crash—except it wasn’t random. They’d been carrying on a year-long affair behind everyone’s backs, including Jenny’s husband Jonah (Dave Franco), Chris’s lifelong best friend and brewpub co-owner. Two marriages, two families, one betrayal bomb. And guess who’s left picking up the pieces while pretending everything was fine all along? Morgan and Jonah, of course. Because nothing screams “soulmates” like bonding over the corpses of your cheating spouses.

Cue the inevitable: Morgan and Jonah start catching feelings, fumbling toward a romance that forks their family tree into a pretzel of incest-adjacent awkwardness. The entire second and third acts hinge on audiences rooting for these two to hook up—despite zero chemistry, zero buildup, and the lingering stench of betrayal hanging over every forced smile.

Meanwhile, Clara’s subplot is pure YA wish-fulfillment: she meets brooding aspiring filmmaker Miller Adams (Mason Thames), a kid with a jailbird dad and a creepy grandpa, and decides within 48 hours that she’s ready to lose her virginity to him—first she declares she’s “waiting for prom like it’s her wedding night,” then literally the next day shrugs and jumps him because waiting a few weeks is apparently torture.

Throw in casual weed, hard liquor, and a general attitude that drugs, alcohol, and sex are healthy coping mechanisms for teenagers, and you’ve got the most tone-deaf portrayal of Gen Z since a 45-year-old TikTok mom tried to “speak their language.”

This isn’t a movie. It’s high-budget Hallmark fanfiction cosplaying as drama while pandering to two dying demographics at once: aging women who fantasize that their real soulmate will magically appear after their first marriage implodes, and a shrinking YA audience that Hollywood still pretends exists. The result is a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a tear-jerking redemption arc or a soft-core fantasy about banging your brother-in-law because fate said so.

Allison Williams and Dave Franco have the romantic spark of two wet paper towels. Mckenna Grace is the sole bright spot—watchable, grounded, and clearly ready for real adult roles—but she’s wasted on a storyline that treats teenagers like horny, entitled little sociopaths. The script has no forward momentum after the 25-minute mark: the affair reveal drops, everyone cries for an hour and a half, and the movie just… coasts on vibes that never materialize.

For a 118-minute film, Regretting You somehow manages to have less plot than a single episode of Days of Our Lives. The pacing crawls. The dialogue is greeting-card garbage. The “romance” is so forced it feels predatory. And the moral universe Hoover builds says cheating, lying, and blowing up your family is all worth it if you end up with the person you were “meant” to be with. That’s not love—that’s narcissism in a sundress.

Romance in 2025 is on life support, and movies like this are the ones pulling the plug. Blame whoever you want—Hollywood’s contempt for its audience, progressive fantasies about “finding yourself” at everyone else’s expense, feminists who turned female empowerment into a license to destroy homes, or the slow-motion collapse of traditional marriage—but the patient is flatlining, and Regretting You is the smoking gun.

Turn your brain all the way off and you still won’t enjoy it. Turn it on and you’ll be furious you wasted two hours.

1/5

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